Globalization of production is breaking up the 200 year industrial knowledge monopoly and  backbone of Western  economies; their engineering industries. Development is moved by a distributed manufacturing technology made possible by the integration of computing and communications (C&C) technologies  and the parallel spontaneous   emergence of global markets for specialized subcontractor services and strategic technology acquisitions. C&C technologies influence engineering in three ways; by  (1)  making the design of radically new products possible; (2)  changing the ways hierarchies are  managed  and (3) allowing  a  globally distributed  production organization. This essay is about all three. This gradual process, that began long ago, dramatically raised its pace around the mid 1990s . New C&C technologies then suddenly established the Internet, broadly defined, as a platform for global industrial change in the information, financial and manufacturing dimensions.

While  new  C&C technologies are wreaking havoc on the old engineering industry, they are also offering business opportunities on an unprecedented scale,  taking the old engineering firms into the New Economy,  allowing  mature industrial  economies to compete successfully with  low wage industrializing economies.  Capturing the new opportunities, however, requires entrepreneurial capacities and management practices that are not universally available among the industrial economies. So while some developing economies are successfully adopting the new technologies, and enter onto a rapid growth path, some mature industrial economies are not well organized for the same task and suffer more from the new competition than they benefit from the new opportunities. So the world is going through a great period of creative destruction and is set for increasing diversity.